Dubai: Global powers negotiating with Iran have drawn up a system which will give the UN atomic watchdog access to all suspect Iranian sites, a senior US official said Monday.

“We have worked out a process that we believe will ensure that the IAEA has the access it needs,” the administration official told reporters.

“The entry point isn’t [that] we must be able to get into every military site, because the United States of America wouldn’t allow anybody to get into every military site, so that’s not appropriate,” the official said.

If the system is agreed to by Iran, then it could mark a potential breakthrough in months of negotiations with the Islamic republic which has refused to give the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) access to sensitive sites.

“There are conventional purposes, and there are secrets that any country has that they are not willing to share,” the official said.

“But if in the context of this agreement... the IAEA believes that it needs access and has a reason for that access, then we have a process to ensure that that is given,” the official said.

Iran has denied seeking to arm itself with nuclear weapons, but the IAEA has so far been unable to verify that its atomic programme is entirely peaceful.

The US official, who asked not to be named, said Washington had long insisted that if the IAEA felt it needed access to a suspect site “then they should be able to get it”.

“If that happens to be a military site then that should be available,” the official said, adding the IAEA had an “institutional responsibility” to explore what the possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme may have been.

A senior US official on Monday dismissed suggestions from critics that the United States would cave in to Iran to reach an agreement on curbing Iran’s nuclear programme.

Negotiators still hope for success in the current round of negotiations in Vienna and no one is talking about a long-term extension to the talks, the official said, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity. But he added that he did not know if an agreement could be reched.

The official said that if the United States had wanted to make huge concessions to reach a deal it could have done so long ago and that such criticism was “absurd”.

Meanwhile, US Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser Colin Kahl was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that the “real political deadline” for a final nuclear deal is July 9.

Kahl’s comments, noted the paper, are the first public acknowledgment that the US team is allowing itself more than a week of wiggle room to get the deal done.

Kahl said that deadline took into account the 30-day review period that legislation provides for if the deal is submitted to Congress before July 9 and a 60-day review period if submitted after July 9.

The administration doesn’t want to give the Congress 60 days to review the deal and thereby further delay its implementation, Kahl said. If the deal is submitted by July 9, Congress will have to vote its approval or disapproval before leaving town for its August recess. If the deal comes in after July 9, the vote as well as the subsequent potential veto and veto override attempts would be delayed until September.

Asked whether there will even be a final deal, Kahl said, “We’ll see.”

- with inputs from AFP and Reuters